Links

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Charlie Madison: "War is always fought for the best of reasons...We will never end wars by blaming ministers & generals & war-mongering imperialists & all the other banal bogey."

"It's not war that's insane. It's the morality of it. It's not greed and ambition that makes war. It's goodness. War is always fought for the best of reasons. For liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity.

So far in this war, we've managed to butcher some 10 million humans in the interest of humanity. In the next war, we'll probably have to destroy all of man to preserve his damned dignity...

We will never end wars by blaming ministers and generals and war-mongering imperialists and all the other banal bogey. It's the rest of us who build statues to the generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields...

We perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifice...It may be generals and ministers who blunder us into war, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution."

- The great American actor James Garner (1928-2014) as Charlie Madison in the great American antiwar film, The Americanization of Emily, released in 1964, the same year as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May.